Many couples live together before marriage, but it turns out this approach often leads to a lot of pain and heartbreak.
Despite the ease of divorce, marriage is still perceived as being characterized by exclusivity, fidelity, and permanence. As a consequence, the idea to give the relationship “a test drive” first — a period of cohabitation — to see how being together within the same walls works when you have shopping and chores to do, work commitments to juggle, and perhaps already a child to raise, has become widely shared and promoted.
Psychologist Galena Rhoades, who studies young adult relationships, argues in a video on YouTube that: “We generally think that having more experience is better (…). But what we find for relationships is just the opposite. Having more experience was related to having a less happy marriage later on. For example, we found that people who had been married before, people who had lived with a boyfriend or girlfriend before, and having had more sexual partners before marriage, were each associated with having lower marital quality later on.”
She cites various possible reasons for this. For example, constantly comparing with alternatives – and having had experience breaking up in previous relationships – can weaken commitment.
Sociology professor and director of the National Marriage Project (University of Virginia), W. Bradford Wilcox, together with Lyman Stone, a demographer, also showed in a study how much more efficient the so-called traditional and much disparaged model is.
Dan McLaughlin quotes Wilcox in the National Review: “Americans who cohabit before marriage are less likely to be happily married and more likely to break up. Couples who cohabited were 15% more likely to get divorced than those who did not, according to our research.”
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